


we could stick pins in the map

by legete



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Bot Feels, Brother Feels, Character Study, Ficlet Collection, Girls with Guns, M/M, Multi, Not Really Character Death, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-27 01:34:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 2,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/656556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legete/pseuds/legete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brooklyn boys during war and during peace; family and variations thereof; birds that fly and birds that don't; little girls with guns.</p><p>A collection of microfics, mostly about Steve and Bucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. steve/bucky, roadtrip

**Author's Note:**

> Most of these drabble-sized bits were written in response to iTunes Shuffle Challenge prompts given to me by zekkass; I wrote a microfic based only on the title of the random songs she provided. Any major warnings will be provided in that chapter's notes. Although I am marking this as complete, I may update it from time to time with new drabbles.

Captain America and the Winter Soldier stay behind in New York, and Steve and Bucky see America.

They have some sort of MP3 player that Tony pressed on them, thousands and thousands of songs they’ve missed since the 1940s, but mostly they just talk or sit in silence. They’ve never needed words to be comfortable with each other, and that’s slowly coming back.

On a long, flat stretch of midwest highway, Steve sleeps in the passenger seat, knees resting against the glovebox. Bucky catches glances of him in the headlights of other cars, bigger than he remembers, but no less trusting. Four months ago Bucky would’ve killed him if he could’ve, would’ve wrapped a metal palm around Steve’s throat and squeezed until something vital gave. Now Steve wants to be here, going sixty-five in the middle of nowhere, asleep not two feet from an assassin.

Bucky can’t handle it, he can’t.

He pulls off onto the shoulder and tears at his seatbelt until it gives, then stumbles out of the car and into a field of soybeans.

Steve comes and sits beside him a few minutes later, nestles down gently in one of the bare-earth rows instead of crushing plants like Bucky’s doing, and they sit for a long time in silence. There are so many stars, more stars than he can remember seeing since Germany in 1945. Finally Steve reaches over, pulls him in so he’s half-kneeling, wraps his arms around him so that Bucky’s cheek is pressed against Steve’s collarbone. There’s nothing to be said, just the rapid-fire beat of Steve’s heart, and for a searing moment, Bucky imagines waking up to an empty car and not knowing what has happened. He lets Steve lead them back out, bundle him into the passenger side.

They stop at the next Waffle House they find, a glowing yellow outpost along the road, and they drink bottomless cups of coffee while Bucky reflexively flirts with the night-shift waitress and Steve hides his smile behind his mug.


	2. steve/bucky, lullaby

He is eighteen, and he is dying from fever. That’s not an exaggeration; he skirts a knife’s edge for nearly a week, half a step from comatose and a short tumble from death.

In the middle of the day, he imagines his ma has come for him, and in her soft, sweet voice she sings for him the Gartan Mother’s Lullaby, her accent soft over the Gaelic. He is seven years old again, and her songs are her prayers for his survival. He slips away with the daylight, into a murky nowhere time, and he does not know how long passes.

It is night when he stirs, and his father kneels beside his bed and he too sings the Gartan Mother’s Lullaby. He is all in black and white, twenty-two years old and in military dress, a man reconstructed only from a photograph. Steve reaches out a foolish hand, and it is caught. The voice breaks, going rougher and more uncertain than before. _Steve,_ Bucky rasps, coming into focus, replacing ghosts with unshaved face and unwashed clothes, _Christ, Steve, can you hear me?_ Water is held to his lips and he swallows. _You were singin’ that damn song in your sleep,_ Bucky says, like he’s ashamed now that Steve’s awake. _And I thought maybe—_

It doesn’t matter what he thought, in the end. Family is family.


	3. bucky(/steve), basic training

he used to think he was a big man

it wasn’t hard when he was with steve, he was always bigger, always stronger, the two-bit hero with the wicked left hook, the muscle to back up steve’s mouth

he gets to be a cocky son of a bitch for less than a day before he’s heaving his guts out on the side of a dirt path, too much running under too much sun and not nearly enough water

he lies in his bunk that night, fifty-nine other men within talking distance, and grits his teeth while all of his muscles cramp and curl

somewhere to his right a man grunts and a row of bunks creak

it’s too hot to sleep

 _dear steve,_ he thinks

and doesn’t know what else to say

 _dear steve,_ he tries again

_i miss home_


	4. winter soldier, the killing type

The first time, Petrov puts his hand on your cheek and tells you what a fine job you have done. You are shaking, pieces of your arm clattering, that old rough thing they first outfit you with. There is blood in the joins, gumming the mechanics. There is blood in the whorls on the pads of your fingers. You think you remember another time, another man. But Petrov cups your face, warmth against an ungodly chill, and tells you that you have done him proud. The next time, you do not shake.


	5. steve, my life

The article is accompanied by full-color photographs, printed huge on glossy paper. He is cooking in one, his back broad as he swirls oil in a hot pan. _The Real Captain America,_ the title says in blocky print down in the corner. He did not tell the reporter that he was making Bucky’s favorite meal, that he was imaging coming home some evenings to see Bucky at their tiny stove in just his slacks, humming as he prepared whatever they could get for cheap from the butcher’s, the hiss of pan-fried scraps and grocer’s specials. There’s so much now, everything fresh and available and within his budget, but the real Captain America craves something that vanished from Brooklyn Heights seventy years ago.


	6. jarvis&tony, love-colored master spark

He does not have a birthday; one must be born for that. He knows, however, the moment he begins to exist—it is detailed to the nanosecond, the instant he becomes aware. He sees everything at once, blue and black and grey, rooms upon rooms, the twist of a road, a vast stretch of ocean. And in one room, a man. _Hey, hello, hi, you up and running?_ the man says, waving a hand in front of a small camera. A refocus, a narrowing—now the man’s face takes up most of his consciousness. _Hello, sir,_ he replies, from unknown sources, an instinctive reaction. _Hi, JARVIS, hi baby,_ the man says, and his voice has things in it that JARVIS will not know are _love_ and _pride_ for a long, long time.


	7. clint, flying man

He has broken more bones than he cares to name, and certainly more than he has been treated for. There is a price to pay in the high places; there is a trade-off in distances. He can see more but act less, and when he is needed, or is attacked, there are few places to run that are not down. So he has leaned to leap, a splay of limbs before tucking, a hundred thousand such jumps grinding the fear down to nothing but a dull pressure in his chest. And sometimes a grappling arrow finds purchase and he lands catlike on his feet, and sometimes there is nothing to hold onto and he shatters a leg. But it is always the same rush of wind past his face, the same impossible moment of weightlessness, and Clint Barton never closes his eyes.


	8. thor(&loki), i wanna be like you

When they are children, they do not fight more than young brothers ought to.

Loki shows him little tricks, the conjuring of creatures and the hiding of secrets, and he is so much more clever than Thor knows he himself will ever be.

In return, Thor spends long hours with him in the fields, running and sparring and throwing blunted knives until Loki is worn out, and then pushing him harder and farther than before, until they both collapse struggling to find the breath to laugh.

Thor does not recall when they became different men; in his mind, he had a brother in Loki up until the very moment he didn’t. Perhaps, he thinks as he looks at the shattered Bifrost, if he could have been as clever, he would know.


	9. peggy, the beloved tomboyish daughter

For her eighth birthday, he father gives her a bird-gun. She decides she has never loved a thing so much in all her life. Her father teaches her to clean it, to load it, to fire it. The first and the most emphatic lesson he imparts is to never aim at anything she doesn’t mean to kill—but she is a girl with a gun and it is too great a temptation.

Two days later she nicks a passing starling but fails to kill it, for no reason but that it was there. Her father lays his hand across her backside enough times to bring tears to her eyes, then makes her put the creature out of its misery. She wraps the bird in a stitch sampler she embroidered with flowers the year before, thread bright against cold still feathers, and buries it under a large stone in the garden.

Years later, when she is a woman and an agent and a survivor, when she lives through a war that takes too many great men, when an American in blue promises her a date he will never make, she will remember aiming at something she never meant to kill.


	10. steve/bucky (steve&peggy), the golden king

Brandt calls him _Midas_ one day after a show in DC, with a giddy chuckle. Bond sales are through the roof, and everything he does bumps them higher. Steve knows that story, though, and it’s not a gift—it’s a curse.

Still, he ends up in Italy, and suddenly he sees luck like it really is. Bucky is alive, and thanks to Steve the 107th rises again. The Commandos slip through a hundred cracks in the following year, catch a thousand lucky breaks. He stops counting the number of lethal shots he deflects with his shield; he stops counting the men of all nationalities he leads out of the bowels of HYDRA camps. _Da_ _mn magic,_ the guys call him, _touched by God himself._ He carefully checks every meal he takes, but his C-rations never transmute.

Bucky laughs at him, this rough thing in his throat, caught there as their lips meet. _Captain Miracle,_ he mutters against Steve’s skin, and the taste of sweat and gunpowder becomes something sweet on Steve’s tongue. Then there is a train, and an explosion, and Bucky is suspended for the longest moment of their lives. Steve knows if he can just get a hand on him,  a finger on him, everything will be all right.

Another second, he thinks afterward, in a bombed-out building in London, another second.

When Peggy tries to take his hand, he pulls away. He’d always known it wasn’t safe.


	11. bucky(/steve), memory recovery

For years, there was nothing. He had been broken open, carved out until nothing remained. Now everything startles something up inside of him, chases the memories across his mind like frightened rabbits. The good is there, and the shame, and he is helpless to stop the flood of them.

(The taste of fountain Coca-Cola, the burn of the carbonation in his nose, and he’s seventeen, sipping around a busted lip while Steve holds a napkin full of ice to the bruise blossoming along his jaw.

The soft latching of a door, and it’s him at twenty-three, home too late from a night of drinking and dancing, trying to get the brewing war off his mind. Steve is sitting up in bed, deep tired circles under his eyes. He wants to fall to his knees and say he’s sorry for making Steve worry, kiss his mouth, the thin column of his throat, the sharp line of his collarbone. That desire scares him enough that instead he acts flippant about it, pretends to be more drunk than he is, and Steve shakes his head like he’s disappointed. _You and me both, pal,_ he thinks, because ain’t it the truth.)


	12. steve/bucky, imperfect cuil theory

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may need to know about cuil theory for this one to make sense. 
> 
> The audio post that inspired me is [here](http://legete.tumblr.com/post/41574659142), so give it a listen if you can handle surrealism.

  * **one cuil:** Bucky is actually Steve's dog. 
  * **two cuils:** Bucky was created by Steve so that he would have someone to talk to, someone stronger and more charming than him. 
  * **three cuils:** Steve is Bucky, they are parts of the same whole, and one of them goes down in the arctic and one of them goes down under the tundra, but they both end up with icewater in their lungs, and in Brooklyn a nun crosses herself and prays. 
  * **four cuils:** Bucky wears the gear of a HYDRA soldier. He points a gun at Steve's head but his finger falters on the trigger. Somewhere far off a man hugs the shoulders of his friend. A plane sinks in the arctic. His arm hurts. He opens his mouth to speak and English suffocates him. He cannot breathe. His chest is too thin. His neck snaps as a shield glances off his helmet. As he collapses, there are no tears in his eyes. 
  * **five cuils:** Steve reaches out with one hand and misses. Bucky falls. He reaches out with one hand, grabs a left arm, and holds nothing but air. Bucky falls. He reaches out with both hands, his footing slips, he plummets. He is in Brooklyn, the sun is warm, they are at Coney Island. Bucky smiles at him from the side of a pier. He stands on the wrong side and holds onto the railing. Steve reaches out with thin hands. Bucky falls. In an alleyway Bucky takes a right hook to the jaw. He twists as he goes down. He lands in a puddle the size of a river and does not surface. Steve's eyes are full of snow. He is sinking through the air, he reaches for his own hand, he cannot scream, his tongue is pressed down in his mouth by metal fingers. Bucky falls. 
  * **six cuils:** Bucky Barnes tells Steve he loves him. As he says it, he falls apart. His hipbones are mountains, his eyes inlets of the sea. His mouth is Brooklyn and his words the people, and this is what Steve has always fought for, it is Bucky's flag he carries on his shield. The earth keeps him jealously. The shoreline sighs as he leaves for Europe. There is a hole in the heart of the nation. It stretches out fingers toward him as he falls short and lands in water. While he sleeps there is a cold war. America and Russia circle around each other like dogs in the street. There is a madness in the land. When he awakes he does not know if it can be fixed. The California coast is all in stainless steel and silicon. The Great Plains are flat and endless, the highways marring them like scars, and when Steve dreams he imagines a young man's body beneath his own. He fights to protect what he loves, and when he bleeds into the dust of his homeland it makes clay. When he arrives home in Brooklyn, someone new and achingly familiar waits in his apartment. 




End file.
